Fighting Malaria Together Newsletter - August 2011

New reports on business investing in malaria control and progress in Zambia launched

Progress & Impact Series reports demonstrate success and rapid return on investment for businesses implementing malaria control programs.

Two new reports in the Roll Back Malaria Progress & Impact Series, Business Investing in Malaria Control: Economic Returns and a Healthy Workforce for Africa and Focus on Zambia were launched in May and June, respectively.

Business Investing in Malaria Control details how companies operating in malaria-endemic regions in Africa—specifically Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Mozambique, and Zambia—have benefitted from their efforts to prevent malaria among their workers and workers' dependents. Private-sector investment has resulted in significant reductions in malaria-related illnesses and deaths, worker absenteeism, and malaria-related spending, as well as a rapid return on investment for companies that have scaled up their malaria control. The report also explores malaria’s negative effect on business—including decreased productivity, employee absenteeism, increased health care spending, and its impact on a company's reputation for social responsibility. The report shows that replicable models exist for businesses hoping to control malaria, protect workers and their families, strengthen their businesses, and extend programmes into communities.

Focus on Zambia describes the origins and mission of Zambia’s National Malaria Control Programme and how its work, when combined with external funding and contributions from the Government of Zambia, has led to appropriate preventive and curative services, such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets, indoor residual spraying, and proper diagnosis and treatment by health personnel, that have delivered good coverage and impact results. These results include reduced disease burden and more saved lives, particularly among children under five years of age. According to the Lives Saved Tool (a model used to estimate impact based on rates of coverage of various interventions), the lives of 33,000 children under five in Zambia have been saved by malaria control interventions since 2001. Maintaining the human and financial resources needed to sustain such gains are among the future challenges also detailed in the report.